Today's announcement comes just a few weeks after we learned about the Samsung Galaxy S4 Google Edition during the company's I/O developer's conference keynote. While we're quite fond of Google's Nexus-branded hardware, it's been pretty lame that until now you've only been able to get other flagship Android phones with each OEM's skin on top of older versions of the OS. Now you can get the two hottest phones out there with the latest version of Android and regular updates.

In other words, this is an awesome trend. Now if only you could get these vanilla handsets subsidized by a carrier. [Google+ via AllThingsD]